Cosmopolitan Christians_ Religious Subjectivity and Political Age

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative
Exchange
Masters Theses Graduate School
5-2013
Cosmopolitan Christians: Religious Subjectivity
and Political Agency in Equiano's Interesting
Narrative and Achebe's African Trilogy
Joel David Cox
jcox68@utk.edu
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Recommended Citation
Cox, Joel David, "Cosmopolitan Christians: Religious Subjectivity and Political Agency in Equiano's Interesting Narrative and
Achebe's African Trilogy. " Master's Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2013.
http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_gradthes/1613

To the Graduate Council:
I am submitting herewith a thesis written by Joel David Cox entitled "Cosmopolitan Christians:
Religious Subjectivity and Political Agency in Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Achebe's African
Trilogy." I have examined the final electronic copy of this thesis for form and content and recommend
that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, with a major
in English.
Gichingiri Ndigirigi, Major Professor
We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance:
Katy Chiles, Urmila Seshagiri
Accepted for the Council:
Carolyn R. Hodges
Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School
(Original signatures are on file with official student records.)

Cosmopolitan Christians: Religious Subjectivity and
Political Agency in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and
Achebe’s African Trilogy
A Thesis Presented for the
Master of Arts
Degree
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Joel David Cox
May 2013

ii
ABSTRACT
The primary texts featured in this study—the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah
Equiano and two novels of Chinua Achebe’s so-called African Trilogy—each constitute
responses to a sly and exploitive Christian modernity, responses which, borrowing from
theories of intersubjectivity articulated by Kwame Anthony Appiah and others, might be
called two cosmopolitanisms: for Equiano, a Christian cosmopolitanism, which works
within available theological structures to revise Enlightenment-era notions of shared
humanity; and for Achebe, a contaminated cosmopolitanism, which ironically celebrates
the modern inevitability of cultural admixture. Despite their separation by time, space,
and even genre, and even more than their common Igbo heritage, the two authors share a
common set of discursive strategies by which they portray a resilient agency among
African “converts,” whose cosmopolitan Christianities allow for and even invigorate
political and cultural resistance. For the enslaved and colonized Africans who come to
profess the religion of their oppressors, the final result is not utter subjection but the
genesis of new, even powerfully radical subjectivities; that is, it is no longer a religion of
oppression, but a new faith entirely. Ultimately, the discursive traps laid by colonial
Christianity cannot restrain the new Christian cosmopolitans who emerge from these
texts to meet the harrowing rhetorical demands of two pivotal, and in many ways quite
similar, moments in modern history.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Cosmopolitan Christians .............................................................................. 1
Voices of Christian Modernity........................................................................................ 1
Defining Cosmopolitanism............................................................................................. 6
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative: A Radical (Cosmopolitan) Logocentrism................ 11
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God: A “Rooted” Cosmopolitanism ......... 16
The Problem of Religion............................................................................................... 22
Chapter 2: Radical Logocentrism and Christian Cosmopolitanism in Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative........................................................................................................ 30
The Book Talks Back.................................................................................................... 33
Radical Logocentrism: A “quiet revolution”? .............................................................. 40
“Almost an Englishman” .............................................................................................. 49
The Word Rematerializes: Equiano among the Miskito............................................... 54
A Christian Cosmopolitanism....................................................................................... 59
Chapter 3: Unmasking the Igbo Sacred: “Rooted Cosmopolitanism” in Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God.............................................................................. 63
Things Fall Apart: “Iconoclash” Writ Large ................................................................ 67
Arrow of God: Remystifying the Sacred....................................................................... 82
Rooted Cosmopolitanism.............................................................................................. 93
Conclusion: The Freedom of Slavery............................................................................ 99
Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 102
Vita.................................................................................................................................. 109

1
CHAPTER I: COSMOPOLITAN CHRISTIANS
The natives of Central Africa are very desirous of trading, but their only traffic is
at present in slaves, of which the poorer people have an unmitigated horror: it is therefore
most desirable to encourage the former principle, and thus open a way for the
consumption of free productions, and the introduction of Christianity and commerce. By
encouraging the native propensity for trade, the advantages that might be derived in a
commercial point of view are incalculable; nor should we lose sight of the
inestimable blessings it is in our power to bestow upon the unenlightened African, by
giving him the light of Christianity. Those two pioneers of civilization—Christianity and
commerce—should ever be inseparable.
--David Livingstone, lecture delivered at Cambridge, April 4th
1857 (21)
I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to
devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he
had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a
shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a generous
eloquence.
--Marlow, Heart of Darkness (Conrad 73)
Voices of Christian Modernity
With more than a century and a half of political history separating us from David
Livingstone’s famous articulation of the “Three C’s” of Civilization, Christianity, and
Commerce, it is perhaps difficult to accept that he believed with perfect naiveté in the
seamless union of those “pioneers” of progress, much less their “inestimable blessing” to
an “unenlightened” Africa. Cecil Northcott, one of Livingstone’s sharpest twentieth-
century critics, doubts whether the doctor’s motives were quite so disinterestedly
philanthropic: “Livingstone was a colonialist and was not ashamed of it. He was in Africa
to offer the benefits of the white man's civilization, and no latter day beliefs in the black
man's freedom, liberation and independence may be read into his actions” (Northcott 74).
Surely, however, one of the enduring lessons of our “latter day” wisdom is that
modernity’s discourse of progress has been productive of precisely the sort of double-

2
think that would allow Livingstone to believe all at once in both “the black man's
freedom, liberation and independence” and the black man’s fundamental inability to
accomplish these by his own means. Certainly, what makes the double-speak of colonial
discourse so insidious is its ability to persuade both the colonizing speaker and, with
more limited success, his colonized addressee.
Livingstone’s indomitable optimism secured his faith in a kind of Christian
cosmopolitanism, for that is what the kingdom of God amounted to for many modern
Europeans: a vision of a world united not by brute conquest but by an emerging
brotherhood among men, mediated by a modern trinity, the Three C’s, and administered
by the first-born of Europe on behalf of the “junior brethren” of Africa.1
But fifty years
after the Cambridge Lectures, Joseph Conrad would give a voice—“A voice!”—to the
pernicious lie brooding beneath the surface of this vision. The Christian cosmopolitan
spirit, whatever its lofty purposes, found a diabolical incarnation in Mr. Kurtz, who had
started out like so many others, “an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of
apostle” (12). His “immense plans” (65), not only for personal gain but for the
enlightenment of a benighted continent, are brutally transmogrified by a rapacious
ambition that has been lurking within him all along, and his global vision becomes a
“voracious mouth,” gaping “as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind.” Driving it
all is this monstrous eloquence, which conquers the primitive hearts of both natives and
vacuous imperial agents before rebounding to captivate the speaker himself.
1
Chinua Achebe quotes the missionary Albert Scweitzer: “The African is indeed my brother but my junior
brother” (“Image” 8).

3
It behooves us to recognize both of these figures—the Emissary of Light and the
Prince of Darkness—as caricatures of colonial and pre-colonial European modernity. For
one thing, Livingstone’s vision for a burgeoning modern Africa achieved by righteous,
decent means notwithstanding, the historical partnership of religion and aggressive
imperialism has become a received fact in postcolonial studies, and for good reason. As
the cultural adhesive holding the Three C’s together, Christianity is justly implicated as
an accomplice to much of the violence of the colonial era; and in addition to bodily
violence and material disinheritance, it is culpable as the vanguard of European cultural
imperialism, in Africa and elsewhere. It is in this capacity that Christian modernity takes
on the character of the hegemon in its own right. A strategic intolerance of competing
worldviews marks it as a paradigmatic example of a totalizing discourse that works
tirelessly to maintain “flexible positional superiority” (Said “Orientalism” 7) in relation
to indigenous structures of belief and cultural practice. Despite their various inflections
among European imperial powers—from the ruthless candor of Spanish conquistadors to
the syncretism of French Jesuits to the hydra-headed British approach embodied in the
Three C's—these imperialist ambitions constitute a large part of the legacy of Christianity
among the enslaved and colonized.
But neither does Conrad’s Kurtz represent the complete legacy of imperialism in
Africa, nor of Christianity for that matter. A perspective that sees imperial culture as
totally hegemonic thinks too little of the capacity for, and indeed the inevitability of,
resilient cultural agency among Africans in spite of more complete—but still not total—
material subjugation. The most brazen lie of Heart of Darkness, and certainly the most
dangerous, is the Africans’ abject submission to the “generous eloquence” of the imperial

4
voice. Of course, Kurtz is as much a “convert” as any of his African subjects, but “the
horror!” to which he surrenders is not “African culture”—a notion seemingly
inconceivable in the novel. His “contamination,” to use Marlow’s word (49), is traced to
a germ of barbaric recidivism which is the only common condition of humanity. That is a
bleak sort of cosmopolitanism, indeed.
The primary texts featured in this study—the Interesting Narrative of Olaudah
Equiano and two novels of Chinua Achebe’s so-called African Trilogy—each constitute
responses to a Janus-faced Christian modernity, which, according to principles articulated
most notably by Homi Bhabha, deploys a discourse about “mimicry” in order to imprison
colonized others on a closed loop between near-complete similarity and near-complete
otherness. Those dynamics might be grafted productively onto the two cosmopolitanisms
I’ve sketched above: a Christian cosmopolitanism, which appeals to the spiritual
brotherhood of all mankind while maintaining Enlightenment-era hierarchies, and a
contaminated cosmopolitanism, which singles out the modern inevitability of cultural
admixture as an object of fear and loathing.2
Despite their separation by time, space, and
even genre, Equiano and Achebe both engage the legacy of Christian modernity by
recourse to their own notions of cosmopolitanism. Even more than their common Igbo
heritage, the two authors share a common set of discursive strategies by which they
portray a resilient agency among African “converts,” whose cosmopolitan Christianities
allow for and even invigorate political and cultural resistance. For the enslaved and
2
As I will discuss below, the notion of “contamination” acquires an ironic inflection among some present-
day theorists of cosmopolitanism, particularly Kwame Anthony Appiah, for whom intercultural contact and
influence is not only a given of modern life but also a potential basis for an efficacious cosmopolitan ethics.

5
colonized Africans who come to profess the religion of their oppressors, the final result is
not utter subjection but the genesis of new, even powerfully radical subjectivities; that is,
it is no longer a religion of oppression, but a new faith entirely. Ultimately, the discursive
traps laid by colonial Christianity cannot restrain the new Christian cosmopolitans who
emerge from these texts to meet the harrowing rhetorical demands of two pivotal, and in
many ways quite similar, moments in modern history.
Lest my tone become too triumphalist here, I should clarify that religion manifests
in both authors as a central problem. Despite what I believe to be their ultimate success in
meaningfully reconstituting and rearticulating their hybrid religious heritages, Equiano
and Achebe have each been read with decidedly less optimism. Equiano’s constant
avowals of devotion to what often looks like a transplanted British Methodism struck
even some early readers as tiresome, and as the collected focus of black writing shifted
from the (ostensibly) ameliorationist goals of Equiano and his late-18th
century
contemporaries to a generally more exceptionalist tone by the end of the 19th
century,
representations of black Christianity likewise acquired an attitude of political dissent
perhaps more recognizable to contemporary readers. Recent discussions of Equiano’s
faith have been productively complicated by the introduction of materialist,
poststructuralist, and postcolonial lenses, with some of the most contentious debate
centering around the extent to which Interesting Narrative is a straightforwardly
“Christian” text in the first place, especially where a direct correlation is assumed
between its political efficacy and its distance from hegemonic, “white” cultural forms.
Achebe’s work, by contrast, particularly his first three novels, seems to treat colonial
religion in the opposite manner. Things Fall Apart is in large part an indictment of British

6
missionaries, whose advancement into the Nigerian interior precipitates the unraveling of
flawed yet stable indigenous communities. The novel’s immediate success in Africa and
abroad, not to mention Achebe’s commentary in subsequent essays and lectures, affirmed
a central rhetorical purpose—to reclaim for Africans, corporately conceived, a sense of a
dignified, pre-European (and thus pre-Christian) cultural heritage. Much like Equiano,
Achebe’s legacy as a custodian of ennobling cultural knowledge remains an open
question.
The purpose of my entry into these conversations is to suggest subtle yet
significant revisions in our approach to religious subjectivity in these texts. But before
outlining this argument further I should pause to explain my use of the term
“cosmopolitan,” which as I have suggested acts as my primary lens.
Defining Cosmopolitanism
In his 2006 book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Kwame
Anthony Appiah uses two terms that are especially valuable for describing the rhetorical
purposes served by both Equiano and Achebe in their deployment of religion. The first
term is his titular subject: “cosmopolitanism.” Despite its roots in schools of thought that
spurned local obligations in favor of the ideal—and usually the mere idea—of becoming
a liberated, sophisticated “citizen of the world,” the cosmopolitanism Appiah envisions
offers a sort of middle ground between “the nationalist who abandons all foreigners” and
“the hard-core cosmopolitan who regards her friends and fellow citizens with icy
impartiality” (“Cosmopolitanism” xvii). The value to strive for, he claims, is “a partial
cosmopolitanism,” a commitment to abiding in the tension between local “pockets of

7
homogeneity” and the threatening heterogeneity that results from the inevitable traffic
between and among localities. Rather than reflexively insulating these pockets from
change in the interest of cultural continuity, Appiah suggests that we acknowledge a sort
of serial homogeneity: “Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of
a society can survive through these changes…We do not need, have never needed, settled
community, a homogenous system of values, to have a home” (Cosmopolitanism 107;
113). He has elsewhere called this value a “rooted” cosmopolitanism, which affirms “the
cosmopolitan ideal—you take your roots with you”—without forgetting that ours is “a
world in which everyone is...rooted...attached to a home of his or her own, with its own
cultural particularites” (“Patriots” 95; 92).
Appiah opposes his view to that of “well-meaning intellectuals” (he calls them
“cultural imperialists”) who have insisted upon the sanctity of cultural difference; and
though cultural differences are “real enough,” and to an extent worth protecting, “it’s just
that we’ve been encouraged…to exaggerate their significance by an order of magnitude”
(“Cosmopolitanism” xxi). He goes on to explain:
Talk of cultural imperialism structuring the consciousness of those in the
periphery treats [local cultures] as tabula rasae on which global capitalism’s
moving finger writes its message, leaving behind another homogenized consumer
as it moves on. It is deeply condescending. And it isn’t true… When people speak
for an ideal of cultural purity…I find myself drawn to contamination as the name
for a counter-ideal. (“Cosmopolitanism” 111, emphasis in original)
“Contamination” is the second key term, though Appiah’s ironic usage jettisons Marlow’s
anxiety. To be contaminated in this new sense means to come into contact with and even
be changed by the forces of heterogeneity that have shaped cultures even before the
intensified globalization of the modern era, but without a paralyzing fear of cultural

8
disinheritance. Indeed, contends Appiah, only among Western (and Westernized)
intellectuals, for whom the preservation of “authentic” cultural artifacts is tantamount to
the preservation of a people, does contamination evoke the same breathless terror that
Marlow feels. Rather, there is a “mass culture” in Africa comprised of people who
have been influenced, often powerfully, by the transition of African societies
through colonialism, but they are not all in the relevant sense postcolonial…[they]
are not...concerned with transcending, with going beyond, coloniality…What is
called "syncretism" here is a consequence of the international exchange of
commodities, but not of a space-clearing gesture [that is, the anxiety about
epistemological autonomy that informs the “posts” of both postmodernity and
postcoloniality].” (“Postmodernism” 348)
Appiah is, of course, differentiating between “colonial modernity” as an all-
encompassing cultural matrix and “modernization” as a material consequence of
colonialism that nevertheless allows cultures to undergo practical evolutions without
damaging or displacing cultural “essences,” though his implication is that essentialism is
a philosophical mistake—and political dead end—in the first place.3
However, as a basis for a practical ethics or politics, a term like “contamination”
can be a red herring: “No doubt,” Appiah concedes, “there can be an easy and spurious
utopianism of ‘mixture,’ as there is of ‘purity’” (113). This is a tension explored by Bruce
Robbins and Pheng Cheah in their Cosmopolitics of 1998, in which they reconsider the
theories of subjectivity that have long informed how culture is deployed by scholars of
postcoloniality and globalization. The resistance among many of these scholars to
3
Simon Gikandi has called this interstitial state a “decolonized modernity,” although for him this is an
idealized, aspirational state imagined in response to “a destabilizing epistemological juncture: [the imperial
subjects’] past identities could not disappear entirely, nor could they remain central to their lives—hence
the paradoxical claim that colonialism barely scratched the surface of African cultures but radically altered
their socioeconomic institutions…It was in their attempt to mediate this unstable epistemological position
that cultural nationalists in the colonial world came to rewrite the history of African (or Indian) identities as
a self-willed return to a precolonial past, now read as a first step toward a decolonized modernity” (37).

9
cosmopolitanism as a paradigm for addressing the injustices endemic to the new global
order is the idea’s historic dependence on the same normative criteria propping up the
illiberal modern nation-state—rationality, authority, nature, exteriority, etc. But neither
can a postcolonial politics align with what Appiah calls “[anti-]cultural imperialism”—
that is, the belief in absolute cultural particularity that merely displaces the “given” of the
nation with the “given” of culture. As Scott Malcomson explains in his contribution to the
Cosmopolitics project, the renewed interest in cosmopolitanism is due to its offering a
“normative edge...to the inclusiveness and diversity of multiculturalism—[it is] an
attempt to name a necessary and difficult normativeness” (260). Faced with the
unenviable task of articulating a non-normative normativity, postcolonial studies has
turned to a discourse of hybridity, of more or less strategic “rootlessness.” Hybridity
theorists, as Cheah names them, have (like Kurtz?) “kicked themselves loose of the
earth” (Conrad 66), digressing into a realm of pure theory that bears no resemblance to
material geo-political realities: “[A] simplistic analogy between the contingency of
signification and the contingency of socio-cultural formations repeats the axiom that
reality is discursively constructed. But what exactly is the political purpose in
postcolonial studies of the commonplace assertion that discourse produces the real?”
(294) It has been standard practice in postcolonial studies since Edward Said, Cheah
reminds us, to engage politics as discourse, but a celebration of subversive hybridity (and,
mapped onto the globe, subversive mobility, transience, migrancy, etc.) risks forgetting
that culture is composed of both discursive and material formations; indeed, Cheah
argues that the blindly anti-nationalist sentiment of hybridity theorists—he engages
Bhabha and James Clifford directly—leads them to disavow the only viable socio-

10
cultural structure—the nation-state—with enough muscle to shift the global balance of
power on behalf of real displaced populations.
Inevitably, “cosmopolitanism” as I will use it connotes a productive tension in the
work of Equiano and Achebe rather than a tidy solution. There is much to be said for
Salman Rushdie’s description of the writer who ventures “outside the whale,” bound by
all the contingencies of experience, yet wresting from that outer chaos an imaginative
vision of a more liberating politics (qtd. in Said “Culture” 27). And I think it’s true that
both Equiano and Achebe, in their own historically available ways, face a similar
challenge: to resist the normative discourses of race, nation, geography, and even
humanity that inform Christian modernity without reinscribing those normativities in a
narrative that merely inverts the “givens” of the colonizer’s faith. What’s more,
considering the political/rhetorical tasks they’ve appointed for themselves, both men
must find a way to glimpse the world from the outside while keeping both feet planted
firmly on the ground. Cosmopolitanism, as I understand it, is a name for this labor, and
contamination is its fruit.
Still, my talk of “new subjectivities” and “new faiths” demands an awareness of
the pitfalls of a purely speculative politics. As with all products of culture, The
Interesting Narrative and The African Trilogy are at once discursive and material
phenomena, with causes and resonances in both domains, many if not most of which are
practically irretrievable for scholars. While I will offer a few narrow, focused narratives
regarding major discursive trends, immediate historical contexts, intertextual legacies,
and even biographical factors, my goal is not to confirm the translation of the “new
subjectivities” or “new faiths” from the domain of discourse into the domain of practical

11
political action, although those translations very well may have taken place. Rather, I
have set out to demonstrate how both authors find new ways of thinking about enslaved
and colonized African subjects in relation to both imperial and indigenous cultures by
bringing a distinctly cosmopolitan perspective to bear on the matter of Christian
modernity.
Equiano’s Interesting Narrative: A Radical (Cosmopolitan)
Logocentrism
In suggesting a union between Europe’s commercial and religious interests in
Africa, Livingstone was not blazing a new trail. In fact, the strategic cooperation of
Civilization, Christianity, Commerce had been encouraged seventy years before by a man
of African descent, Olaudah Equiano, who was in turn reappropriating a well-versed line
of argument. In the final pages of his 1789 memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life
of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, the African
slave turned enterprising maritime merchant turned best-selling author and political
activist expresses a fervent hope in the eventual success of something very like a Three
C’s approach to the abolition of the slave trade:
May Heaven make the British senators the dispersers of light, liberty and science,
to the uttermost parts of the earth: then will be…Glory, honour, peace, &c. to
every soul of man that worketh good; to the Britons first, (because to them the
Gospel is preached), and also to the nations…As the inhuman traffic of slavery is
now taken into the consideration of the British legislature, I doubt not, if a system
of commerce was established in Africa, the demand for manufactures would most
rapidly augment, as the native inhabitants would insensibly adopt the British
fashions, manners, customs, &c. In proportion to the civilization, so will be the
consumption for British manufacturers. (233)
As an alternative to the Atlantic slave trade, “commercial intercourse with Africa”
appeals to “motives of interest as well as humanity” (234). Africa’s tremendous natural

12
wealth in abundant and productive land, not to mention the potential for a huge, untapped
market for British goods, is being squandered, Equiano insists, by a trading practice that
is as economically inefficient as it is morally bankrupt.
Taken in isolation, this passage affirms a Christian cosmopolitanism in which
Britons take the lead as “emissaries of light,” bringing their junior African brethren into a
state of civilization and liberating them from the horrors of the slave trade without
sacrificing their wealth; indeed, the potential for increase is immeasurable! However, as
Vincent Carretta demonstrates in his 2005 biography of Equiano, a gradualist, politic
approach was the preferred tactic of the burgeoning British abolitionist movement, into
which Equiano was becoming initiated by the late 1780s. Carretta observes that The
Interesting Narrative makes “two strategic decisions” gleaned from the experience of
established abolitionists: to join an economic argument with a moral one, and to target the
slave trade without expressly attacking the institution of slavery itself (251). Carretta
explains: there was general agreement that the abolitionist cause “should not let the
pursuit of the excellent—the eradication of slavery—diminish the chances of achieving
the good—abolition of the slave trade” (252); moreover, it was widely agreed that
abolishing the trade would eventually bring about emancipation anyway.4
So, if it seems
that The Interesting Narrative is ameliorationist, there is good reason to view this as a
political calculation rather than a disappointing failure of belief.
4
Carretta connects Equiano’s abolitionist rhetoric to, among others, the founding members of the Society
for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST), who renounced slavery as both “impolitick and
unjust” and named as their object “the abolition of the slave trade, and not of the slavery which sprang from
it”; this despite the fact that two of its more influential members, William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp,
were on the record in opposition to both (251-52).

13
While Equiano’s gradual economic emancipation is a prominent subplot
throughout The Interesting Narrative, the privilege of place granted to the economic
argument of the final chapter belies the book’s more radical agenda to intervene in
Christian modernity’s pursuit of normative criteria for defining the human. As many have
since recognized, Equiano understood that the slave trade was built on an ideological
foundation of which Christianity was an integral part. The notion of the immanent Word
of God in nature, the divine logos, adapted by the Gospel of John from the Greek Stoics,
found expression in a secularized, scientific Christian modernity as the Cartesian cogito,
the germ of divinely appointed humanity. Reason displaced the logos as the mark of
authority, but in many ways it operated no less theologically; and the Word, once
manifest primarily in the revelation of Nature, was given a different materiality with the
emergence of literacy as the sign of a new humanity. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has famously
brought this history to bear on the first generation of African autobiographers:
After Descartes, reason was privileged or valorized, over all other human
characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread,
was taken to be the visible sign of reason…Blacks were reasonable, and hence
“men,” if—and only if—they demonstrated mastery of “the arts and sciences,” the
eighteenth century’s formula for writing. So, while the Enlightenment is famous
for establishing its existence upon man’s ability to reason, it simultaneously used
the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity
of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been “discovering” since
the Renaissance. (130)
“Through the act of writing alone,” he goes on to insist, “Equiano announces and
preserves his newly found status as a subject.”
The placement of “coming into being” through literacy at the heart of a reading of
The Interesting Narrative runs the risk of collapsing back into the very assumptions of
Western modernity that Gates aims to discredit. Granted, it is undeniable that much of the

14
rhetorical power of Equiano’s biography for its contemporary readership was
accomplished by the addendum to the title, “Written By Himself.” As was the case with
Phillis Wheatley, the mere existence of a book of some literary value (to state the
minimum, which both Wheatley and Equiano certainly exceed), or even aspiration to
such value, written by “an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa” was a powerful argument
against the overweening stereotypes of Africans as emotional rather than intellectual and
thus less than human (Wheatley “To the Publick” 8). Of course, even this seemingly
universalizing standard for human recognition is undermined by a strident refusal on the
part of the Enlightenment intellectual to recognize any merit whatsoever in African
literature. Consider the famous generosity Wheatley’s most prominent detractor, Thomas
Jefferson, who “never yet could…find that a black had uttered a thought above the level
of plain narration” (139). Jefferson’s dismissal of Equiano (as Gustavus Vassa) was even
more strident: “If I were even to allow some share of merit to Gustavus Vasa,
[contemporary African autobiographer] Ignatius Sancho, &c. it would not prove equality
more, than a pig having been taught to fetch a card, letters, &c. would show it not to be a
pig, but some other animal” (qtd. in Carretta 268). This is why we should not conflate the
rhetorical mission articulated in the front matter of The Interesting Narrative with the
argument of the text at large. Whatever affected mortifications Equiano performs in his
opening dedication—apologizing for “a work so wholly devoid of literary merit…as the
production of an unlettered African” (7)—his text demonstrates an understanding that the
Jeffersons of the world will not concede the common ground of humanity easily. Gates’s
reading suggests that the objective fact of having written a book satisfies The Interesting

15
Narrative’s rhetorical ambitions, whereas it actually aims, as it must, at a transcendent
literacy beyond the judgment of the strategically subjective criterion of “literary merit.”
Still, Gates is the touchstone for a whole tradition of Equiano scholarship that
reads his politics from an oversimplified sense of the role played by literacy. If he is read
as having reinscribed the normative criteria of Cartesian literate humanity, Equiano’s
more radical politics is limited to “latent readings of the ‘true’ nature of Western culture”
(158) and other discreet subversive tactics, each of which involves the “naming” of the
logocentric conceits of Christian modernity. This kind of politics is burdened by a
daunting rhetorical double-bind: he must simultaneously project African subjectivities
that are assimilable within modernity’s paradigm for normative humanity while also
refusing the very normative logic that constitutes the paradigm in the first place. Or to put
it another way, if normative literacy inexorably casts Equiano as subaltern, his ability to
speak is only conceivable as somehow radically and abstractly “hybrid” or “rootless,”
after the fashion of Cheah’s hybridity theorists.
I will suggest, by contrast, that The Interesting Narrative engages in rather than
deconstructs a radical logocentrism, and it accomplishes this by recourse to a new take
on “Christian cosmopolitanism.” Equiano recovers the Johannine inflection of the logos
as the immanent Word of God in nature. This theology is not only democratizing,
establishing a new normative literacy accessible to all mankind regardless of race, but it
also privileges Equiano as the bearer of a special revelation. Throughout The Interesting
Narrative, and by various means, Equiano argues that he is not just “potentially” part of
the human community but is in fact more in tune with the immanent Word of God in
nature than those Britons who claim to be God’s foreordained “emissaries of light.”

16
Therefore, his politics are more overtly radical than they might appear, precisely because
they are anchored in a theology held sacred (at least ostensibly) by his target audience.
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God: A “Rooted”
Cosmopolitanism
As I’ve said, Chinua Achebe has faced a rhetorical challenge comparable to
Equiano’s. But where Equiano must find ways to differentiate a privileged African
Christianity while working within an assimilationist frame, Achebe’s appeals to a sort of
“rooted cosmopolitanism” must negotiate a late- and postcolonial political atmosphere in
which African writers are being called upon to assert their absolute difference, often
despite writing in colonial languages and literary forms. Indeed, since the publication of
Things Fall Apart in 1958, critics have fixated upon authenticity as the measure of the
novel’s success, albeit with often radically different inflections of the term. Writing the
year after the novel's first printing, a reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune remarked,
with a Jeffersonian sort of generosity, that the book was an “authentic native document,
guileless and unsophisticated…[devoid of any] sense of plot or development…This is
plain and unvarnished storytelling in the best primitive tradition” (qtd. in Nelson 28).
Faithful reportage, unassuming presentation: this, it seems, was the most a precocious
young Nigerian should aspire to when taking the “primitive” as his subject. Of course,
given the manifest virtuosity of the novel—the rich subtlety of its style, the power of its
narrative, its remarkable timeliness—such cranky anachronisms as the Herald Tribune
review were quickly consigned to archival obscurity. Still, even as Things Fall Apart
garnered significant local attention as a watershed moment in the development of a
national (and ultimately continental) literature—and certainly because of “the

17
decolonizing, nationalist ethos of those years…[which] permeated the criticism that
emerged with it”—the questions of African authenticity and cultural autonomy “became
the overarching problematic[s] to which critical responses in one way or another
addressed themselves” (Garuba 245). If cultural reclamation and self-definition was a
basic concern of this first era of Anglophone African literature, it was in no small part to
the direct efforts of Achebe himself to articulate it: “I would be quite satisfied,” he has
famously explained, “if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than
to teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of
savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them”
(“Novelist” 72).
Abdul JanMohamed has characterized this original scene of African fiction in
English as expressing a “double bind” seemingly the inverse of Equiano’s: the
Anglophone African writer feels compelled to protect the dignity of his culture against
the denigrations of Europeans, whose Manichean standards find African artists wanting
by virtue of their difference. So the African writer feels he must choose between being
true to a native tradition rendered stagnant by colonial interference and becoming
alienated from his own culture by taking up the cultural forms of the colonizer (5). The
burden is so severe as to be pathological, as Frantz Fanon famously argued. But Achebe
has not only accepted the role, JanMohamed contends, he has embraced it: “In short,
Achebe wishes the African writer to undertake the awesome task of alleviating the
problems of historical petrification [stagnation] and catalepsy [alienation]” (155). Filtered
through our cosmopolitan lens, the double bind takes shape as competing normative
pressures—to grant the premises of colonial culture or to appropriate “native” culture for

18
the construction of a distinctly African normativity. The dilemma is further complicated
by Achebe’s location at the interstices of both cultural forces, the son of native African
missionaries, educated in a British colonial school, but driven to the reclamation project
by his disillusionment with colonial prejudice and the fear of cultural loss. It is at least
partly because of his Christian missionary parents, no doubt, that his novels stage this
central preoccupation with clashing cultures on a spiritual plane.
The most persistent criticism of Achebe has, in turn, centered on his response to
the double bind. In fact, his early novels serve as one of Appiah’s primary examples of
the “cultural imperialist” sensibility. A first stage of African writers, Appiah contends,
were still caught up in a misguided battle over the cultural legacy of Africa, so much so
that they failed to recognize—and in fact helped to produce—the ultra-nationalist
regimes of the early post-colonial days, which turned out to be “kleptocracies”:
The novels of this first stage are thus realist legitimations of nationalism: they
authorize a "return to traditions" while at the same time recognizing the demands
of a Weberian rationalized modernity. From the later sixties on, such celebratory
novels become rare. For example, Achebe moves from the creation of a usable
past in Things Fall Apart to a cynical indictment of politics in the modern sphere
in A Man of the People. (“Postmodernism 349)
Just a year after Things Fall Apart, Frantz Fanon levies a similar complaint about those
Western-educated African intellectuals for whom “the demand for a national culture and
the affirmation of the existence of such a culture represent a special battlefield” (209),
only Fanon is arguing from the perspective that the search for national cultures actually
detracts from the important business of nation-building:
The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that you do not
show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence
in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation. No colonial
system draws its justification from the fact that the territories it dominates are

19
culturally non-existent. You will never make colonialism blush for shame by
spreading out our little known cultural treasures under its eyes. (223)
“The native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art,” he continues,
“must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities” (225, my
emphasis), not its erased cultural pasts. Achebe is not named by Fanon, but he is certainly
implicated in the sweeping rebuke of the investment of political value in cultural
reclamation.
My reading of Achebe’s early novels is somewhat different. In order to read
Things Fall Apart as a narrative of nationalist legitimation or an exercise in cultural
essentialism one must efface certain deep ambiguities in Achebe's representation of
various modalities of African experience, particularly of Igbo sacred space. It is my
contention that these ambiguities combine to produce, among other things, a vision of the
“rooted cosmopolitanism” described by Appiah himself and many of the contributors to
Cosmopolitics. This model for postcolonial subjectivity is the most useful paradigm
available for reading the dynamics of belief, conversion, and agency in Things Fall Apart
and Arrow of God. My reading doesn't suggest that Achebe represents this ideal with
perfect fidelity, nor that the novels can be read as manuals for a new emancipatory
politics. Rather, it is my claim that Achebe’s two most celebrated novels, despite having
been written in the earliest days of African literature as we have come to know it, express
an epistemological maturity that theories of postcoloniality have only recently advanced
enough in turn to appreciate.
Specifically, I will argue that the novels evince a notional “contamination” that
can be meaningfully opposed to the kind of contamination stigmatized by Marlow in

20
Heart of Darkness. Of course, Achebe’s denunciation of Heart of Darkness in a 1975
lecture was a seminal moment in the development of postcolonial thought as such. Here
he is taking Conrad to task for his manifest fear of “contamination”:
Conrad's liberalism would not take him quite as far as Schweitzer's, though. He
would not use the word brother however qualified; the farthest he would go was
kinship. When Marlow's African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart,
he gives his white master one final disquieting look.
And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he re-ceived his
hurt remains to this day in my memory-like a claim of distant kinship
affirmed in a supreme moment. (p. I24)
It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his words, is not talking so
much about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The black man
lays a claim on the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of
this claim which frightens and at the same time fascinates Conrad, "the thought of
their humanity-like yours . .. Ugly." The point of my observations should be quite
clear by now, namely that Conrad was a bloody racist. (“Image” 8-9)
It might be easy to imagine because of this vitriol that Achebe simply inverts Marlow’s
disgust with the prospect of contamination—European racism is a corruptive foreign
agent that destroys native culture, which must reassert its primacy in order for Africans to
regain a proper and effective sense of themselves and their past. Borrowing a phrase from
Sartre, Achebe has characterized this kind of inversion as “an anti-racist racism, to
announce not just that we are as good as the next man but that we are much better”
(“Novelist” 72). Aimé Césaire takes up this position more earnestly in his Discourse on
Colonialism (1972): wherever European colonization spreads,
a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins
to spread…at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the
boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of
Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery. (13,
original emphasis)

21
Césaire’s metaphor literalizes the counter-response Achebe refers to. If Western man has
denigrated African culture as barbaric, he warns, it is only by neglecting the “crowning
barbarism” of the West: Nazism (14). “It would be worthwhile,” he goes on, “to reveal to
the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century
that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that
Hitler is his demon” (14). Césaire does not object to intercultural contact in principle, he
is quick to add. But under the spectre of Nazism, the monstrous offspring of Christian
modernity, which “oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack” (14), it is more important
than ever to assert the basic dignity of African traditional society, which is communal,
democratic, and staunchly anti-(and “ante-”)capitalist (23).
Achebe bucks this contemporary trend toward radical African particularity. While
he has taken up the banner of indigenous cultural heritage consistently in his prose, his
fiction (as well as more subtle threads in his essays and lectures) has the bark of
essentialism but not the bite. To be a modern(ized) African, Achebe’s oeuvre argues, is to
be contaminated; and anticipating current notions of cosmopolitanism by thirty years, his
work sets about exploring the tension between a native home and cosmopolitan exile
without the radical particularism that will eventually produce theories of impossible
hybridity:
Poor me, you might think, what kind of life can result from the interplay of such
an array of forces? Does the more homely circle of Igbo ethnicity, for example,
exert a stronger impact on the self than the wider African identity? Is the poor
fellow stretched by competing claims on a painful rack of rival antagonistic
identities? I regret I cannot report any intolerable stress or excitement. Perhaps it
is my Igbo inheritance which comes to my aid by upholding so consistently the
notion of plurality. Where something stands, something else will stand beside it.
Perhaps it all goes back to the Igbo relationship to the pantheon of their gods and
goddesses. (“Country” 15)

22
This speaks to the core of Achebe’s deployment of the Igbo sacred as a sign of cultural
pluralism. When Christian missionaries arrive in Igboland intent on displacing Igbo ritual
practices, the Igbo draw on wisdom more fundamental than religion; or rather, they draw
on the proverbial wisdom which, taking various forms, constitutes their religion and thus
the true Igbo essence: “Where something stands, something else will stand beside it.”
The Problem of Religion
As I have said, religion is the source of the most problematic moments in both
The Interesting Narrative and Achebe’s early novels, and debates over Equiano’s
Christianity have been particularly contentious. Adam Potkay and Srinivas Aravamudan,
to take a notable example, have tussled over the role of Christian hermeneutics in reading
The Interesting Narrative. Potkay laments what he sees as “postcolonial theory's efforts at
refashioning Equiano in its own image” (“History” 611) by reading into his narrative
ahistorical or rhetorically inappropriate motives, particularly ascribing to him a
subversive attitude toward the Christian frame in which he writes: “Postcolonial critics
are apt to read back into the language of those colonized or displaced by empire signs of
creolization, parodic subversion, or ‘talking back’—in Equiano's case, however, those
signs are faint and all too easily exaggerated by those who, programmatically, seek them
out ” (602). Potkay suggests that the only legitimate lens for reading the religious
dynamics in The Interesting Narrative is the one Equiano himself provides—not
surprisingly, that paradigm is presumed to be an unequivocally Christian one. For
Aravamudan, on the other hand, Potkay's “new twist on academic anti-intellectualism”
elides the landmark contributions of critics like Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates

23
toward an appreciation of the “rhetorical and religious slipperiness of the text” (“Lite”
617). Far from disqualifying Equiano’s faith as a fruitful domain of study, Aravamudan
says his aim is to parse out “the multiple and complex ways in which religious fetishism
and readerly agency inhabit the text and jostle for characterization and narrativization as
‘Christian,’ ‘African,’ and ‘literate’” (“Lite” 616).
Rightly, I think, Aravamudan dismisses “vacuous reaffirmations” of Equiano’s
Christianity as “a privatized evangelical vision with little theological and political
content” (“Lite” 616). However, it bears pointing out that Aravamudan projects onto the
narrative a privileged poststructuralist hermeneutics that may not be historically
appropriate. The Interesting Narrative, as he reads it in his Tropicopolitans of 1999, calls
attention to its own constructedness, revealing the structure of spiritual autobiography to
be a mere “shell,” which “crumbles to reveal a political manifesto” (“Tropicopolitans”
244). With good reason, Aravamudan reacts against those critics who “construct a
‘Christian self’” for Equiano “as something present,” which “makes for an
Enlightenment narrative that subsumes more interesting contradictions” and his
“performance of Christianity for an English audience” (n. 392-3, original emphasis); the
critical impulse to distrust the ostensible “sincerity” or “artlessness” of autobiography is
an indispensable asset in reading Equiano’s Narrative as a reconstruction of his past for
an intended audience and with a rhetorical purpose that very likely does supersede
verisimilitude or narrative “honesty” narrowly conceived. But the arbitrary distance
imposed between “belief” and “practice” needs to be acknowledged as a contemporary
scholarly construction. Aravamudan’s seeming emphasis on an at least semiconscious
constructivist agency on the part of an author who offers a latent code for his text’s

24
deconstruction does indeed risk being disingenuous about Equiano’s deployment of faith
in The Interesting Narrative.
Beyond the now-commonplace antagonism between the “liberal academic left”
and the “evangelical right” for which this spat no doubt acts as a proxy, what seem to be
at issue are conflicting ideas about what it means for literature to be religious. As Jordan
Stein and Justine Murison point out in their 2010 introduction to a special issue of Early
American Literature on religion, discussions of religion in literature tend to assume a
naïvely descriptive posture, when in fact “religion” is constructed by scholarship
according to various assumptions about what religion is, how it operates, and why (or
why not) it matters. Stein and Murison suggest instead an approach that treats religion “as
a critical problem” (1). Potkay’s working definition of religion suggests a “total social
system,” which is itself fully coherent and which Equiano not only draws upon for
rhetorical strategies but also believes in with fully coherent belief, with something like
ideal theological orthodoxy. 5
Readings of Equiano’s religion and its rhetorical uses that
do not take for granted a direct correspondence between The Interesting Narrative’s
theology and institutionally available, biographically verifiable, and historically
generalizable forms of Christianity are dismissed as misguided, or worse, disingenuous.
5
Stein and Murison identify “‘Religion’ as a social framework” as one term in “a
taxonomy of some of the various meanings of religion that have emerged within the
field” of early American literary studies (1). Although I differ from them somewhat in the
particulars of my application of the term to Potkay, the basic idea of the author’s total
absorption within “a fundamentally coherent body of thought” (5)—which can be
reconstructed by meticulous scholarship—remains intact. The other three predominant
scholarly conceptions accounted for in the taxonomy are: religion as a “rhetorical
construction,” as “ideology,” and as “a category of experience.”

25
Aravamudan takes a more skeptical approach, blending, it would seem, elements of Stein
and Murison’s categories of religion as rhetorical construction—“a problem embedded in
the nature of language” (“Lite” 10)—and as ideology—“a normative system…a name for
the summation of [social and rhetorical] components in an overarching theory of the
machinations of power” (10-11).
Ultimately, I am less interested in the sincerity of Equiano’s belief (which I do not
doubt) than I am in his mobilization of a spiritual subjectivity that both invigorates and
delimits the potential of his Interesting Narrative for powerful resistance. Nor will I be
particularly concerned with the distinction between mobilization and belief, weighed
down as it is with contemporary anxieties. That said, my reading does construe The
Interesting Narrative as a spiritual autobiography primarily, and I engage explicitly
theological concepts en route to an account of the narrative’s political valences. But these
terms need not be imposed on the text by an imperious critic-zealot; rather, they are the
terms suggested by the text itself, and they merit not credulous cataloguing under
“traditional” religious categories but thoughtful exposition and creative application to the
interests of contemporary readers. What we need is not a potentially naïve commitment
“to read Equiano as he asks to be read” (Potkay “Equiano” 677). Instead, I would join
Eileen Elrod in a commitment to “take seriously both the religious rhetoric and religious
questions” posed by Equiano’s autobiography “and to contextualize these questions in
their historical and literary moments,” as opposed to merely taking Equiano’s piety at its
face value (17).
Achebe’s portrayal of Christianity does not prompt comparable scholarly
disagreement, largely because of the assumption that the realist novel effaces the

26
authorial self, whereas the autobiography, as has been well established, is by its nature a
performance of identity (and often multiple identities) under the sign of the unified self or
the self becoming fully realized. Thus the autobiography invites speculation as to the
sincerity of the speaker, and the realist novel presumes the authority of the narrative
voice. But in Achebe’s late-colonial context, where indigenous structures of
consciousness must be defended against the aggressive delegitimizing efforts of colonial
Christianity, to be “realist” in the conventional (European) sense means to adorn the
trappings and the suits of modern epistemology—rigid empiricism and detached
objectivity. Therefore, the problem of religion in Achebe’s early novels arises from the
tension between the reader’s expectation of a “real” African sacred—that is, of a sort of
“magical realism” wherein the “supernatural” is folded into the “possible” under the
supervision of a credulous narrator—and Achebe’s actual insistence, especially in Things
Fall Apart, on a detached, anthropological narration that calls direct attention to the
artifice of Igbo sacred ritual. If Equiano asks the reader to believe with him,
problematizing modern theological assumptions en route to a truer belief, Achebe,
remarkably, seems to problematize belief itself by foreclosing our willing suspension of
disbelief, without lapsing into a postmodern cynicism about the role of the sacred in
stabilizing a community, or even as a source of legitimate self-actualization.
In Achebe’s novels, then, we arrive at an arena of performed religious identity—at
a sacred stage—by a different route. But his portrayal does not discredit or debunk the
Igbo sacred. Rather, he is radically challenging the normative category of belief in the
first place. Bruno Latour, noted critic of the modern social sciences, offers a useful lens
for Achebe’s activity here, his “ceasing to believe in belief” (2): “Belief is not a state of

27
mind but a set of relationships among people…The visitor knows; the person visited
believes” (2). Belief is not a native state, in any sense of the word; belief is constructed,
not by those who are called “believers,” but by “the visitor” for whom belief is the
subordinate term in an opposition between truth and falsehood, knowledge and
ignorance. Latour continues:
Let us apply this principle to the case of the Moderns. Wherever they drop anchor,
they soon set up fetishes: that is, they see all the peoples they encounter as
worshippers of meaningless objects. Since the Moderns naturally have to come up
with an explanation for the strangeness of a form of worship that cannot be
justified objectively, they attribute to the savages a mental state that has internal
rather than external references. As the wave of colonization advances, the world
fills up with believers. A Modern is someone who believes that others believe. An
agnostic, conversely, does not wonder whether it is necessary to believe or not,
but why the Moderns so desperately need belief in order to strike up a relationship
with others. (2)
If the reader is troubled by the anthropological tone of Achebe’s narrator, it is owing to
the expectation that his avowed rhetorical mission entails a defense of the validity of
native beliefs. His novels are a powerful argument to the contrary—they reject the
category of belief itself, recognizing in it the will to power that poisons cultures and
ultimately destroys them. His Igbo do not “believe” in their gods and goddesses; they
take for granted that what Christian modernity insists on calling belief is really “a set of
relationships among people.” Nor are eventual mass conversions of Igbo to Christianity a
matter of changing one “belief” for another, at least not for most. Religious conversion is
an expression and a consequence of shifting relationships among and between
communities. This is the essence of cosmopolitan contamination and “Where something
stands, something else will stand beside it”: a culture’s defining characteristic is its
degree of willingness to subordinate arbitrary cultural structures to the present realities of

28
human relationship—that is, to instrumentalize the forms of sacred practice in order to
realize the most effective functions of the sacred in general.
I will end with Bhabha’s famous scene of Christian “conversion,” where “Anund
Messeh, one of the earliest Indian catechists, made a hurried and excited journey from his
mission in Meerut to a grove of trees just outside Delhi” (1876). Messeh finds in the
grove a group of 500 people engrossed in reading and discussing the Christian Gospel,
translated into Hindi by a Hurdwar missionary. He is frustrated by the corruption of the
Gospel in their untutored practice. The Hurdwar converts continue to practice caste, they
wear white in lieu of baptismal rites, and they refuse the Sacrament: “because the
Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us” (1876). Their challenges,
Bhabha concludes at length, expose the contingency of Biblical (as colonial) authority on
unstable relationships of difference rather than on the supposedly firm ground of pure
“Englishness.” “After our experience of the native interrogation,” he says,
it is difficult to agree entirely with Fanon that the psychic choice is ‘to turn white
or disappear.’ There is the more ambivalent, third choice: camouflage, mimicry,
black skins/white masks…When the words of the master become the site of
hybridity…then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change
the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain. (1889)
I must draw a final distinction between the discourse of hybridity articulated here
and the value of contaminated and/or Christian cosmopolitanism. Returning to the
categories of Stein and Murison, we can see that Bhabha, like Aravamudan, reads religion
as a metonym for ideology and discourse (or ideology as discourse), and so to be
“converted” is to be co-opted and overwritten. Resistance, on the other hand, is located in
acts of reading between the lines, in the ambivalence of a “psychic choice” for
“camouflage” and “hybridity,” and it is left to the imagination how these might become

29
manifest in material resistance. This is precisely what the texts of Equiano and Achebe
reject—Equiano because would-be hegemonic religious ideologies can be revised and
rearticulated by a politics grounded in a common theological vocabulary, Achebe because
specific cultural knowledges are arbitrary and subordinate to the bedrock reality of
human interconnectedness. The item from the Stein/Murison taxonomy that seems most
appropriate to describe my working definition of religion is “religion as a category of
experience,” defined by one scholar as “not so much…‘doctrinal convictions,
or…specific ecclesiological practices, but the fund of basic attitudes by which
[“believers”] confron[t] and transfor[m] reality’” (15). For both of these authors,
separated by gulfs of time, geography, and genre, cosmopolitanism becomes a concrete
way of expressing hope that forces of modernity, shrinking the globe as they expand,
might be harnessed to make brothers out of estranged men.

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CHAPTER 2: RADICAL LOGOCENTRISM AND CHRISTIAN
COSMOPOLITANISM IN EQUIANO’S INTERESTING NARRATIVE
One night, when his work was done, his boss came into his cabin and saw him with a
book in his hand. He threatened to give him five hundred lashes if he caught him again
with a book, and he said he hadn’t enough work to do…He said it just harassed him; it
just set him on fire. He thought there must be something good in that book if the white
man didn’t want him to learn…Here was the key to forbidden knowledge…He got the
sounds of the letters by heart, then cut off the bark of a tree, carved the letters on the
smooth inside, and learned them…He made the beach of the river his copy-book, and
thus he learned to write.
-- Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy (35-6)
Eighteenth century readers were invited to chuckle good-naturedly when Olaudah
Equiano recalled his earliest encounters with the miracle of reading: seeing his boyhood
master and a white footman “talking to books,” the young slave felt a mélange of
astonishment and envy when, as though by magic, the books seemed to talk back. And
perhaps readers felt they could sense a barely-suppressed grin on the face of the older,
wiser narrator as he admitted, in a book of his own, “I have often taken up a book, and I
have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me;
and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent” (68). But the self-
deprecating charm of the anecdote belies a startling reality—that the child is in fact
correct, that a book can speak. Not only that, it also chooses to whom it will speak
according to a principle of election not beholden to the pernicious politics that would
keep a young slave of the black Atlantic from learning to read or write in the first place.
Many scholars follow Henry Louis Gates in a reading of the talking book episode that
essentially amounts to a Derridean critique of Western logocentrism—that is, Equiano
positions himself ironically in relation to a Western fetish of “presence” within the book
and other catachrestic objects, although the strategic exclusions of the “white” literacy he

31
is compelled to engage foreclose all but the most oblique expressions of an authentic
“black” literate subject.
However, few have given adequate attention to a second instance of the talking
book trope, a transformative encounter with the Bible late in Equiano’s quest for some
source of ontological and material security. The episode brings into focus Equiano’s
dramatization of the acquisition of literacy as an engagement in rather than a critique of a
radically logocentric hermeneutics; by recourse to this theology, presented as a kind of
special revelation, Equiano can not only anchor his subjectivity in the recognition he
receives from the divine logos via the written word, but he can even establish a privileged
position from which to call to account the wayward “Christian” nations engaged in the
Atlantic slave trade. So, far from being subsumed within a hegemonic Christianity
modernity and its sanctioned discursive forms, The Interesting Narrative reappropriates
and reinvigorates artifacts of Western theology in a vision of empowering, transcendent
literacy that would remain active in African diasporic literature throughout the 19th
century. Cosmopolitanism is one model for describing Equiano’s strategies for speaking
out from an interstitial yet indexable position in the margins of Christian modernity and
implicating himself in its construction of normative categories for describing the human.
The Interesting Narrative invokes the divine Word as a counter-sign to the Cartesian
cogito, hoping to render diffuse the tremendous normative potential of a logocentric
theology. Radical logocentrism also holds promise for Equiano as a democratizing,
universalizing corrective to a Christian modernity that has distorted the logos into a site
and sign of human difference, grafting a twisted logocentrism onto emerging racial

32
ontologies, all in the interest of protecting an immense economic interest in the illicit
trafficking of expendable human labor.
At its most basic, The Interesting Narrative is about the quest for freedom.
However, it is a testament to the complexity of the text that it remains an open question
whether Equiano is indeed “free” by the book’s end. Indeed, the greater part of critical
work on Equiano since his resurgence of popularity in the last forty years has taken up
this problem to some extent. With this in mind, Cathy N. Davidson offers the useful
reminder that a text as “indeterminate” as The Interesting Narrative “can simultaneously
be polemically powerful and unresolved” (22). In describing the political valences, both
productive and restrictive, of Equiano’s work with religious subjectivity I am not
implying that Christian theology offers a special code for unraveling the stubborn
complexity of The Interesting Narrative, nor certainly that it is sound policy to ignore the
secular modes of Equiano’s protean narrative self. What I contend is that The Interesting
Narrative deploys the rhetoric of the logos to support Equiano’s vision of a virtual polity
of the enslaved and oppressed, not only existing but speaking out from a theologically
indexed position in the discursive margins and intervening on behalf of what might be
called the cause of a Christian cosmopolitanism.
Published one hundred years after Equiano’s narrative, Francis E. W. Harper’s
Iola Leroy (see Epigraph) powerfully distills the attitudes toward literacy and special
agency inaugurated by The Interesting Narrative. By the time Leroy’s Tom Anderson
makes nature his “copy-book,” he is rehearsing a drama of self-empowerment and even
self-realization through literacy that has been reenacted by countless authors of the
African diaspora, and he enters into a trans-historical conversation with Equiano and

33
other early black writers who were likewise “set on fire” for the recovery of a stolen
birthright. Gates’s argument that the early black writer’s primary rhetorical aim was “to
demonstrate his or her own membership in the human community” is incomplete (128).
When Tom carves his transgressive letters into clandestine manuscripts of tree bark and
sand, he signals a desire for knowledge that does not passively receive but actively
shapes. And when, like all prophets, he has learned what he needs in the wilderness, the
letters will become a voice speaking from the margins of the boss’s world, but a voice of
authority and judgment, not that of an outcast merely seeking to belong. Harper explains
a few pages earlier that “slavery had cast such a glamour over the Nation, and so warped
the consciences of men, that they failed to read aright the legible transcript of Divine
retribution which was written upon the shuddering earth, where the blood of God’s poor
children had been as water freely spilled” (12). For Tom, as for Equiano a century before,
the question is not whether by learning to read and write he will become more like his
white masters, but rather how, for all their talk of God, they could have so badly misread
the Word He has written “upon the shuddering earth.”
The Book Talks Back
After undergoing what Vincent Carretta calls “a spiritual crisis” upon his return to
London from an eventful Arctic expedition (161), Equiano experiences a religious
awakening in the tenth chapter that forms the core of my reading of The Interesting
Narrative. While anchored in the port of Cadiz, he begins to feel premonitions of
“something supernatural. I had a secret impulse on my mind of something that was to

34
take place” (189). Later that evening, while meditating over Acts 4:12,6
his premonition
is validated by the return of the phenomenon of the talking book, related this time with a
tone of reverent exuberance suitable to one who has experienced a genuine miracle:
I began to think I had lived a moral life, and that I had a proper ground to believe
I had an interest in divine favour; but still meditating on the subject, not knowing
whether salvation was to be had partly for our own good deeds, or solely as a
sovereign gift of God:—in this deep consternation the Lord was pleased to break
in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light; and in an instant, as it
were, removing the veil, and letting light into a dark place, Isa. xxv. 7. I saw
clearly, with the eye of faith, the crucified Saviour bleeding on the cross on Mount
Calvary: the scriptures became an unsealed book, I saw myself a condemned
criminal under the law…I then clearly perceived, that by deed of the law no living
flesh could be justified. I was then convinced, that by the first Adam sin came,
and by the second Adam (the Lord Jesus Christ) all that are saved must be made
alive...I was sensible of the invisible hand of God, which guided and protected
me, when in truth I knew it not: still the Lord pursued me although I slighted and
disregarded it; this mercy melted me down. Sure I was that the Spirit which
indicted the word opened my heart to receive the truth of it as it is in Jesus—that
the same Spirit enabled me to act with faith upon the promises which were
precious to me, and enabled me to believe the salvation of my soul. (189-91)
Were this scene the work of one of Equiano’s free, white contemporaries, it would be
unremarkable, even hackneyed7
; coming from Equiano, it is revolutionary. Through the
first nine chapters, every avenue he has taken in pursuit of equal recognition—under the
law, through entrepreneurial ingenuity, by extraordinary acts of courage on behalf of both
slaves and their masters, and even through baptism and uncommon fidelity to the
commands of scripture—has been a dead end. But in this passage, Equiano calls attention
to the need for an ontological center that stands outside of the contingent world and by
6
“Neither is there salvation in any other [but Christ]: for there is none other name under heaven given
among men, whereby we must be saved.”
7
The genre of the conversion narrative was well-worn enough that Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, who
famously panned The Interesting Narrative in her 1789 review, found “[t]he long account of his religious
sentiments and conversion to methodism…rather tiresome,” despite her obvious sympathy with his cause
(qtd. in Carretta 332).

35
virtue of whose recognition he can re-triangulate his relationship to other men, free and
enslaved. That center is also the means by which recognition might become irrevocable,
since “the Spirit” which speaks out of the written word is the logos of the Gospel of John,
the enduring Word that is both the sign and the substance of God’s presence immanent in
creation, and thus is not really contingent upon literacy in any “literal” sense. One of the
basic conceits of this study is that what Equiano presents as an ontological center is at the
same time, of course, a rhetorical center. In fact, an effective summary of my approach to
theology in this text is that I do not attribute to its author quite so complete a separation
between the rhetorical and the ontological as have many recent critics. So when I claim
that this revelatory moment constitutes a conversion8
to a “transcendent literacy” through
which Equiano constructs a privileged yet critical position within Christian modernity, I
am allowing for an interpenetration of “belief” and “practice” that need not be
compulsively parsed in order to appreciate the polemical power of the text.9
Gates has famously anchored his interpretation of Equiano in the first appearance
of the so-called “Trope of the Talking Book,” related in the narrative’s third chapter:
8
I will refer to this scene below as “the conversion moment,” or else some recognizable variation.
9
In Equiano, The African: Biography of a Self-Made Man, Carretta ably demonstrates Equiano’s penchant
for self-promotion, but does not conclude that Equiano’s personal and even pecuniary interest in his book’s
success undermines its rhetorical power. Regarding Carretta’s famous disclosure (now over a decade ago)
of birth records suggesting Equiano may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa as he claims,
I do not think this is cause enough to split Equiano’s theology cleanly into the “genuine” and the
“performative.” For one, I agree with Davidson that “people fudge the facts for any number of reasons”
(37) and that “decades of excellent work” on the “social ideologies…imbedded in the form” of archives
“should have made us far more circumspect about how to read documents” (35); moreover, I share
Jonathan Elmer’s view that “the challenge of Equiano’s text…is to resist a division between rhetoric and
facts, the literary and the historical” (n77) in favor of a more nuanced impression of Equiano’s rhetorical
investment in “refashion[ing] himself as the African” (Carretta 367) and in the various means by which he
uses his transfiguration as a representative of Africans to reimagine for them a more empowering position
vi-a-vis God and men.

36
I had often seen my master Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity
to talk to the books, as I thought they did, and so to learn how all things had a
beginning: for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it,
and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have
been very much concerned when I found it remained silent. (68).
Gates traces the trope back to the earliest black autobiographers, three of whom—James
Gronniosaw, John Marrant, and Ottobah Cuguano—write before the publication of The
Interesting Narrative. For Gates, the primary dynamic of the talking book trope is one of
silence and absence, with the foundational example being Gronniosaw, who deduces that
the book fails to speak to him as it does to his white master because “every body and
everything despised me because I was black” (qtd. in Gates 136). The act of creating
one’s own book, by writing or dictation, is tantamount to coming into being as a modern
reasoning subject by “speak[ing] [oneself] into existence among the authors and texts of
the Western tradition” (138). Unlike Gronniosaw, however, Equiano uses the trope in an
act of signifyin(g), “a fiction about the making of the fiction” (158). Gates yokes the
talking book scene in The Interesting Narrative to a moment earlier in the same chapter
when young Equiano encounters two other strange Western objects, a gold watch and a
painted portrait, which he likewise “endows…with his master’s subjectivity” (155). Gates
shrewdly observes that the young slave’s fascination with each of these items is both a
charming rhetorical turn—“see here how funny I was to think such a thing,” as Ronald A.
T. Judy paraphrases (86)—and a remarkably apropos “naming” of Western commodity
fetishes. By reflecting on the incident through the performed naïveté of the young
Equiano, the author is able to foreground the absurd yet devastating process by which the
Atlantic slave trade makes commodities out of human beings as though they were objects

37
(158). For Gates, this moment is Equiano’s fullest realization of his ascendance from
mere object or commodity to full, speaking subjectivity:
“By revising the Trope of the Talking Book, and by shifting from the present to
past and back to present [his curious switch to the present perfect in the passage
excerpted above] Equiano the author is able to read these objects at both levels
[the “manifest” level of the child’s naïve understanding and the adult’s
appreciation of the “latent” implications of the objects for questions of subject-
/objectivity] and to demonstrate his true mastery of the text of Western letters and
the text of his verbal representation of his past and present selves” (157).
As I have suggested, though, the conversion moment and not his learning to merely read
should be read as a commentary on the chapters that come before; taking what he sees as
a more transcendent hermeneutical activity as its subject, Equiano makes the conversion
a referendum on Equiano’s previous aspirations to full subjectivity in the realm of
literacy. Most join Gates in reading Equiano’s shift in tense in the talking book scene
from the past perfect (“I had often seen…”) to the present perfect (“I have often taken up
a book…”) as a means of narrative distancing that situates Equiano the autobiographer in
a position of wry superiority and ironic judgment over Equiano the illiterate child. This
element is certainly present (at the “manifest” level, as Gates says), but the present
perfect may also indicate an incomplete literacy that continues to develop beyond
Equiano’s technical mastery of the written word.
To substantiate this argument I follow Gates’ trail of the Trope of the Talking
Book to its “erasure” (166) in John Jea’s The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings
of John Jea, where “[the] figure has become decadent in the repetition” (132). Whereas
Equiano deploys the trope self-consciously, Gates says that Jea literalizes it to the point
of rendering it “unrepresentable” to future black autobiographers, hence its erasure. Jea’s
episode with the talking book unfolds similarly as in the texts of Gronniosaw and

38
Equiano, with white readers performing a conversation with the book (the Bible, as is
most often the case) as a demonstration of power. Particularly despondent after the book
refuses to speak to him, Jea begs God to “give me the knowledge of his word, that I
might be…able to speak it in the Dutch and English languages, that I might convince my
master that he and his sons had not spoken to me as they ought, when I was their slave”
(qtd. in Gates 160). He continues:
The Lord heard my groans and cries at the end of six weeks, and sent the blessed
angel of the covenant to my heart and soul, to release me from all my distress and
troubles, and delivered me from all mine enemies, which were ready to destroy
me; thus the Lord was pleased in his infinite mercy, to send an angel, in a vision,
in shining raiment, and his countenance shining as the sun, with a large Bible in
his hands, and brought it unto me, and said, “I am come to bless thee, and to grant
thee thy request,” as you read in the Scriptures. Thus my eyes were opened at the
end of six weeks, while I was praying, in the place where I slept; although the
place was as dark as a dungeon, I awoke, as the scripture saith, and found it
illuminated with the light of the glory of God, and the angel standing by me, with
the large book open, which was the Holy Bible, and said unto me, “Thou has
desired to read and understand this book, and to speak the language of it both in
English and in Dutch; I will therefore teach thee, and now read”; and then he
taught me to read the first chapter of the gospel according to St. John; and when I
had read the whole chapter, the angel and the book were both gone in the
twinkling of an eye, which astonished me very much, for the place was dark
immediately… (161).
Gates, of course, does not overlook the import of the text Jea reads (or rather speaks):
John 1:1, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among men, the fullest expression of the
divine logos. “Only God,” Gates acknowledges, “epitome and keeper of the Word, can
satisfy the illiterate slave’s desire to know the Word…because all human agencies are
closed off to him by slavery” (164). Jea repeats this miracle in the presence of the
minister, then in front of the magistrates, who determine that such a man could only be
“taught of God” (163). And the miracle is compounded when Jea reveals to close the

39
scene that he remains functionally illiterate, only able to “read” the Word of God that
emanates from the sacred book.
At this point, Gates’ archaeology of the trope comes quite close to striking at the
heart of its mobilization in Equiano’s text. But by characterizing Jea’s literalizing revision
as a “decadent” departure, a reductio ad absurdum, he fails to see that Jea is actually
rendering at the ”manifest” level the relationship to the Word that also operates at the
“latent” level of Equiano’s Narrative. That is, Gates misses that Jea’s text fulfills
Equiano’s rather than revises it: as an illiterate man, Jea is able to dramatize a kind of
direct communion with the divine logos that Equiano cannot possibly represent within the
economy of literal literacy. But it is nonetheless crucial that Equiano reads “with the eye
of faith” rather than abstract reason, that “the Lord…break[s] in upon [his] soul with his
bright beams of heavenly light”; and that it is only the Spirit which frees him “to act with
faith upon the promises” which have been vulnerable to foreclosure in every other agency
Equiano has attempted to acquire, whether legal, economic, or literate/literary. The irony
manifest in the talking book passage is not merely that the reader (by definition) “knows”
that books do not “talk,” nor that Equiano is “naming” an unconscious commodity fetish
of a Western modernity that defines itself as directly opposed to fetishism. The ironic
distancing of the narrative voice in that moment also signals that the child has been right
all along, and that the “presence” the book demands is not the presence of “whiteness”
(and the ironic voice invites us again to chuckle at the naïveté of the young Equiano who,
mere paragraphs after encountering the book, tries in vain to rub the blackness off of his
face to imitate the “rosy” complexion of his playmate), but the presence of an ordained

40
soul who belongs to the elect of God and recognizes itself as having been selected to
partake in a transcendent subjectivity that cannot be as easily revoked.
Radical Logocentrism: A “quiet revolution”?
The intervening decades notwithstanding, Gates’s position continues to set the
tone for much Equiano scholarship, at least as a general theoretical frame.10
What
preserves Equiano’s political agency is the ironic inflection of his self-actualization
through writing, though this means entry into the murky territory of politics by pure
subversion. Susan M. Marren follows Gates in describing Equiano’s “transgressive self,
whose existence, ironically, challenges his readers to scrutinize the very social structures
that their preoccupation with racial difference had sought to mask” (94). Beyond
becoming a literate subject, Marren argues, Equiano goes on to fulfill virtually all of the
Enlightenment prerequisites for recognition as a full subject: by “[a]sserting himself as an
Englishman, he manages to lull readers into a sense that he is both in and of English
society and thus that his protests against elements of that social order are the protests of
one whose differences with it are fully resolvable within the existing structure” (104).
Likewise, Gate’s ur-trope of “Signifyin(g)” becomes politically charged as a double
articulation, a transgressive mimicry speaking back the content of Christian modernity,
10
Matthew J. Pethers notes that, “[f]or all the promises of [Gates’s] insights” into the origins of the Trope
and Equiano’s use of it, “the critical response to them has been strangely cursory” (111). As I’ve suggested,
my own impression is that Gates initiates an enduring and prominent line of critique taken up by other
Equiano scholars; indeed, it is with Gates and his critical protégés (at least in terms of certain aspects of
their scholarship) that I am engaging now. If, however, Pethers is referring to the general acceptance of
Gates’s archaeology of the “Trope of the Talking Book” as a given with often limited scrutiny, then we’re
in agreement on that point.

41
but with a subversive difference. “Signifyin(g)” is something more—that is, something
louder—than the “quiet revolution” suggested by Marren (95). Certainly, if we grant
Gates his premise, “Signifyin(g)” resonates within the African literary tradition as a
shared poetic heritage and political tactic. Still, mere “ironic doubling” seems a markedly
less polemic discourse of resistance than that envisioned by an author whose professed
objective is “to inspire [members of British Parliament] with peculiar benevolence on that
important day when the question of Abolition is to be discussed, when thousands, in
consequence of your determination, are to look for Happiness or Misery!” (Equiano 8).
Indeed, if Equiano’s interaction with the talking book signals only absence, Gates
concedes that “we are justified in wondering aloud if the sort of subjectivity that [he]
seek[s] can be realized through a process that is so very ironic from the outset” (169).
Marren, for her part, explains that Equiano is burdened by the double-bind described in
the introductory chapter: in order to challenge the normative categories of Christian,
Cartesian modernity without becoming unintelligible to that very governing paradigm, he
must find a way to be “marginal,” “ambiguous,” “heterogeneous,” “fluid,” and “fleeting”
all at once (Marren 95).
What Equiano is performing according to these readings amounts to a
deconstruction of fetishes of “presence” within Western discourse; that is, he is laying
bare its logocentric conceits. In “making [his] text speak with a black voice” (Gates 131),
Equiano pulls back the curtain on a discourse that deploys a racialized notion of the logos
in a grand scheme to perpetuate the immensely lucrative exploitation of African slave
labor. The dynamics of selective “presence” that regulate and restrict modernity’s
humanizing literacy indicate a correspondingly selective metaphysics, which in turn

42
produces (and is produced by) the phenomenon of the slave trade. Before taking these
dynamics for granted in Equiano’s text, however, it behooves us to examine their
theoretical pedigree, particularly Gates’s special debt to Jacques Derrida. In her preface
to Derrida’s Of Grammatology, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides this gloss on
Derrida’s definition of logocentrism, which quite naturally mirrors Gates’s history of
literacy within the Cartesian frame: logocentrism is “the belief that the first and last
things are the Logos, the Word, the Divine Mind, the infinite understanding of God, an
infinitely creative subjectivity, and, closer to our time, the self-presence of full
selfconsciousness” (lxviii). She continues:
It is this longing for a center, an authorizing pressure, that spawns hierarchized
oppositions. The superior term belongs to presence and the logos; the inferior
serves to define its status and mark a fall. The oppositions between intelligible
and sensible, soul and body seem to have lasted out “the history of Western
philosophy,” bequeathing their burden to modem linguistics’ opposition between
meaning and word. (lxix)
Moreover, Derrida extends the privileging of the logos metonymically to describe any
kind of “centrism,” any “human desire to posit a ‘central’ presence at beginning and end”
(Spivak lxviii). It is in this spirit, too, that Gates links the Western desire for selective
“presence” within the book to an equivalent desire directed at other “white” commodities.
In doing so, Gates places Equiano in diametric opposition to a logocentric Western
metaphysics; he cannot participate in it because it specifically precludes the possibility of
his speech:
When Equiano, the object, attempts to speak to the book, there follows only the
deafening silence that obtains between two lifeless objects. Only a subject can
speak. Two mirrors can only reflect each other, in an endless pattern of voided
repetition. But they cannot speak to each other, at least not in the language of the
master. (156)

43
Gates is attempting to rescue Equiano from a fate worse than silence: cooptation of the
black voice by “the language of the master.” For Gates (for reasons that seem virtually
axiomatic), to reinscribe the form of a discourse is to reinscribe the ideologies that
undergird it, and inversely to demonstrate the “authentic” blackness of Equiano’s form is
to liberate his ideology as well by locating it within “a saving marginality.”11
I am contending instead that certain aspects of a logocentric metaphysics,
particularly as it manifests in his Christianity, become politically efficacious for Equiano,
far more so in fact—not least because they are more accessible—than an indirect, “quiet
revolution” in which his text offers a latent code for its own deconstruction. This is not to
say that The Interesting Narrative cannot do that, too. But as part of an effort to take
Equiano’s religion seriously, we should register the extent to which young Equiano’s
aspirations toward an assimilating technical literacy are subsumed within mature
narrator-Equiano’s realization of transcendent literacy, and thus his authorization to read
aloud, in a bold voice, a litany of sins committed against the divine order by a “Christian”
modernity in the name of a false logos, perversely distorted by bigotry and greed.
William L. Andrews offers a helpful description of the balance I am trying to
strike between these two “literacies”:
In the slave narrative the quest is toward freedom from physical bondage and the
enlightenment that literacy can offer to the restricted self- and social
consciousness of the slave. Both the fugitive slave narrator and the black spiritual
autobiographer trace their freedom back to an awakening of their awareness of
11
This is what Joseph Fichtelberg has called this commonly conceived emancipatory space among Gates’s
contemporaries (he is critiquing Houston Baker’s “blues matrix”): “If ideology, viewed from “within”—
surely the vantage point of autobiography—demands closure, subversion becomes impossible, and the
writer’s enslavement is absolute. How, then, can one assess subversive texts?” (140).

44
their fundamental identity with and rightful participation in logos, whether
understood as reason and its expression or as divine spirit. The climax of the
quests of both kinds of autobiographer usually comes when they seize the
opportunity to proclaim what are clearly complimentary gospels of freedom.
Before the fugitive slave narrator could have success in restoring political and
economic freedom to Afro-Americans, the black spiritual autobiographer had to
lay the necessary intellectual groundwork by proving that black people were as
much chosen by God for eternal salvation as whites. Without the black spiritual
autobiographer’s reclamation of the Afro-American spiritual birthright, the
fugitive slave narrative [of the mid-19th
century] could not have made such a
cogent case for black civil rights. (7)
Andrews affirms something Gates precludes—that the form of the spiritual
autobiography can be a source of political empowerment without resorting to regimens of
ideological “subversion,” at least in the contemporary sense of the term. What hinders
Gates from recognizing Jea’s text as a fulfillment of Equiano’s, for example, is his
assumption that to be theologically earnest about “the master’s religion” is to become
politically compromised. It is certainly revealing that the “erasure” of the talking book
trope in Jea is attributed by Gates to a turn to the “supernatural,” which is more or less
tantamount to absurd reduction. He explains:
Because [Frederick] Douglass and his black contemporaries wish to write their
way to a freedom epitomized by the abolition movement, they cannot afford Jea’s
luxury of appealing, in his representation of his signal scene of instruction,
primarily to the Christian converted. Douglass and his associates long for a
secular freedom now. They can ill afford to represent even their previous selves—
the earlier self that is transformed, as we read their texts, into the speaking
subjects who obviously warrant full equality with white people—as so naive as to
believe that books speak when their masters speak to them. Instead, the post-Jea
narrators refigure the trope of the Talking Book by the secular equation of the
mastery of slavery through the “simple” mastery of letters. Their dream of
freedom, figured primarily in tropes of writing rather than speaking, constitutes a
displacement of the eighteenth-century trope of the Talking Book, wherein the
presence of the human voice in the text is only implied by its absence… (167-68)
There are some assumptions at work here that risk being disingenuous about the function
of scripture and the “supernatural” (or what we might less prejudicially term the
theological) in Jea’s text, and thus also Equiano’s. First, Gates assumes that, in directing

45
their texts “primarily to the Christian converted,” early black autobiographers are
primarily pursuing an agenda of identification, aspiring to equal standing with Britons
before God. But as The Interesting Narrative is at pains to demonstrate, Equiano is not
only as good a Christian as the white men with whom he associates, he is quite often
better, especially after his transformative encounter with the logos in the conversion
moment. Indeed, as I will argue below, The Interesting Narrative as a whole is infused
with the kind of righteous indignation that comes from having been elected to stand apart
from “Christian” society as a prophet of God’s righteous wrath. Also implicit here is an
assumption that Gates states explicitly elsewhere—that the Bible is “the white man’s holy
text” (150), which the African biographer either credulously desires (as in the case of Jea)
or signifies upon with an ironizing, deconstructing “black voice” (ala Equiano). Both
perspectives must ignore the ways that Equiano’s encounter with the second talking book
in the conversion scene directly refutes the notion that the Bible is a respecter of race, or
indeed must dismiss Jea’s literalizing as absurdist theatre.
Secondly, Gates’s secularization theory ignores a radically logocentric theology
that continued to obtain for black writers into the eighteenth century. Indeed, a fuller
investigation of the deployment of the logos in eighteenth century autobiographies—
especially The Interesting Narrative—suggests the inauguration of an eschatological
voice in black writing that persists at least through the nineteenth century, as Iola Leroy
demonstrates. Once again, Gates conflates the “literal” or “supernatural” representation
of communion with the logos with the full range of possible logocentric onto-theologies.
As he does retroactively with Equiano, he effaces the theological underpinnings of later

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